So here are a few paintings form last year, most of which have been for sale at Urban Cow Studios at one time or another. I will also be adding them to the art section to the portfolio, so watch it grow over the next few months!
A while ago I wrote about Bowerbird Bazaar, which was held in the Queen’s Theatre building in Adelaide. Now you can add a new event held at the same space to your calendar, held over two days on February 4th and 5th. I believe I met the principal organizer at an outdoor record stand a few days back, and was definitely excited about the prospect of someone organizing a small scale music/ art festival.
Because we do need more of those in this town, as almost everything else has quickly become big business: higher ticket prices, less space, less creativity, focus on commercial gain. Lost City seems to be on the more marginalised or independent end of the scale, which means less or no TV or radio coverage. So hopefully we can change that through the internet, where one can still advertise things for free. The success of this years event might make it a yearly one! Unfortunately I will be away in Melbourne, but you should have no excuse.
More info here: www.lostcity.com.au
Franz Xaver Messerschmidt was a German-Austrian sculptor most famous for his ‘character heads’, or one could call them a series of studies of mental stress and anguish. I don’t remember how I stumbled onto his work, but it impressed and shocked me immediately. It was like seeing photo stills from a disturbing dream. He struck me as contemporary to Otto Dix or George Grosz or any number of early 20th century expressionists reflecting on a world being transformed by the industrial revolution, social upheaval or world wars.
But he actually belonged to another age entirely and can be seen in the same light as Vincent Van Gogh, Hieronymus Bosch and Francisco Goya. A small group of pre-modern ‘modernists’ who didn’t have a problem with openly depicting pain, anguish, stress, disease, death, war and madness in an era when most art was still sanctioned and commisioned by the state, royalty, religious institutions or the upper classes. It’s work we remember for its emotional or psychological impact rather than its technical finesse.
As such, Messerschmidt’s work still has a very contemporary feel to it. All you have to do is get stuck in a traffic jam, go to work or some kind of a demonstration and you will see at least one expression reminiscent of these sculptures. Or consider the figures as depictions of an internal anguish or struggle occasionally sedated by pills, television or ‘vacations’ (of the mind). After all, considering the rate of change and speed of life today, we could call our age ‘the age of stress’ and these nightmarish grimaces perfectly reflect that.
Adelaide’s Design Market
Well this is a great event I went to in October. Local and interstate designers, artists and craftspeople in an old theatre building, the kind of space which seems to be quickly disappearing in Adelaide. The Queen’s Theatre dates back to 1841 and is a heritage site.
Interestingly, it was managed by the
History Trust of South Australia but as of 2010 it is under the management of the Arts department. It’s now marketed as a performance and market venue, which is an idea that should be applied to more heritage buildings in this town. And it is definitely more creative than demolishing sites of historical and cultural value and replacing them with supermarkets, garages and high-rise flats none of us can afford. We can avoid dealing with high maintenance and rebuilding costs by using these buildings and not leaving them to rot for 30 or more years. Anyway, I should stop ranting now.
I tried to take a few snaps to document the mad rush, but every photo came out the same. A sea of people. This is the only negative side of the event, it gets so packed that you only have a few seconds to stand at a stall before being moved along by the mass of humanity. It becomes a little hard to take it all in, so I suggest visiting several times.
‘Every object tells a story if you know how to read it.’
A companion piece to ‘The Genius of Design’ series, Objectified focuses on design practices today and asks some very important questions. This film focuses on how objects are conceived, developed, manufactured and ultimately how they speak to us. It’s about an industry which makes standardised objects for millions of people, be it peelers, post it notes, chairs, etc. Everything in our world has been designed in one way or another, but most of us don’t notice it.
Designers obviously see this process differently: ‘ When you see an object, you make so many assumptions about an object – what it does, how well its gonna do it, how heavy it is, how much you think it should cost.’
We can see how products are developed (using bicycle grips for peelers) and the move from ‘form follows function’ to removing or hiding functions and symbols entirely. In computers and phones everything defers to the screen, the focus is on function, not the design. From the analog to the digital world, familiarity versus innovation.
Designer Dieter Rams rates Apple as one of the few companies who take design seriously by getting the notion of design out of the way: ‘Good design should be innovative, good design is unobtrusive, good design is consistent in every detail, last but not least: good design is as little design as possible.’ So here you have a kind of Good Design Mantra.
Of course the major challenges have been to ‘give individual character to something that is produced industrially’ and how to still make them affordable to the general public. Marc Newson: ‘Of course, I fundamentally believe that something thats well designed should not necessarily cost more. Arguably it should cost less. But the problem is, design has become a word for a lot of companies to sort of add value. Because something is designed, and therefore charge them more money for it. Things will be marketed in terms of design in the future.’ The iphone is a good case in point, well designed, multi-functional and very powerful but it comes at a high cost. So far, his predictions seem to be true although companies like IKEA have tried a ‘good design at low cost’ strategy. I think that in the light of the current financial roller coaster ride, we will have both options.
An most importantly, the film focuses on questions of culture, innovation and aesthetics versus shelf-life, disposability and recycling. Design that avoids becoming landfill and instead teaches buyers to understand the consequences of their purchases. How do designers become culture generators instead of generators of the environment? Mass communication instead of mass production. But how do you make money without a series of disposable products? I think this will be one of the major questions of this century.
Well this blog is actually an offshoot of a record label, but it covers different artistic fields from around the globe. As far as what I’ve seen so far, the ‘scrapbook blog’ features sound, video and electronic artists. File under ‘futurism’. Pretty interesting..
http://icasea.blogspot.com/
Another interesting blog, this time with a retro futurist bent. Well more accurately: Retro-futurism, Space Age, Robots, Flying Saucers, Whatever. What more do you need? It’s a kind of multimedia gallery featuring some quite obscure film, music, art, advertising, etc from around the world. Another good place to lose yourself in for a few hours and you might even learn something! I did…
http://weirdwardhoblog.blogspot.com/
Ah its been way too long again. Well to celebrate my blog laziness, here is a fairly random photo blog (though there seem to be certain themes popping up) called Goatshoes. There are some amazing shots here well worth your time. Sometimes its just nice to wander through the inernet jungle..
http://thestoryof81.tumblr.com/
Well this was a discovery made through a music video of all things. Every now and then (and this is true of tv ads as well), you see something that sticks with you and you want to investigate further. The video is ‘Tonto’ made for the largely instrumental group Battles by a British based collective United Visual Artists.. They seem to be concerned with modifying space and light through installations and live performance. This includes many different disciplines such as architecture, fine art, engineering, graphic and communication design. I’m guessing that many European music and art festivals feature their work.
The video is an LED installation synchronized with the audio to create a multimedia experience which wouldn’t look out of place on the set of ’2001, A Space Odyssey’. The installation functions as a light symphony and I think it complements the music so perfectly, one hopes it gets used on tour. The alien/ lunar landscape is actually an old Welsh slate mine.
Obviously, I could have included other examples of UVA’s work, but this is a good place to start discovering the rest of the portfolio for those who are interested.
The website is here: http://www.uva.co.uk/
The making of the ‘Tonto’ video can be viewed here and is highly recomended if you want to see the creative process of the collective: http://www.vimeo.com/15299797
Or How I Learnt to Fear the Future
Well its been a while since I’ve posted anything here, so here’s something a little different. Its another interesting documentary I’ve come across that I thought I could share with you. Its what I’ve come to term ‘TV exotica’, because television has (and still does from time to time) beamed some really bizarre programs at us over the years. And I really like seeing what slips through the cracks of ‘entertainment’.
This little gem is hosted and narrated by none other than Orson Welles (!?), which is what got me hooked in the first place. How do you get someone like that to host what looks like a cross beetwen a 70′s b-movie, Discovery Channel and Dr. Who? ‘Dr. Who?’, you ask? Just watch the opening sequence and it will all make sense. Based on a book of the same name by Alvin Toffler, this is one of the weirder and more paranoid documentaries I’ve had the pleasure of seeing. The b-movie feel is further enhanced by a soundtrack which switches between big band exploitation funk and bleeping futuristic synths.
The sight of Mr. Welles puffing on a cigar in an airport is probably more shocking today than anything discussed in the film. Maybe except the idea that someday people will choose to change their skin colour to blue. While being paranoid about everything from computers, cloning and artificial intelligence, the film does get one thing right: impermanence and an ever increasing rate of change and consequently the speed of life. Interchangeable body parts, friends, housing, jobs and even skin colour. Of course very technological or social change shown here is now outdated, but it is interesting to compare with the world of today.
But unlike Marshall McLuhan for example, who called for an understanding or at least a deconstruction of the modern world, Future Shock seems more concerned with causing a sense of moral panic than anything else. I haven’t read the book so my opinions might be incorrect, but you should try to find this slice of paraoid-techno-exotica!
